The question is rarely “what is wrong with me?” It is “can we afford to find out?”.  Against this backdrop, I recently took my house help to Aap Ka Clinic, the free public clinic set up by Professor Javed Akram in his ancestral house.

To dedicate one to the service of the poor is to say that a family’s legacy is best honored not by preserving the house as a monument to the past, but by making it useful to the present.

If even a handful of his colleagues offered a few hours of their week, a room of their clinic, a share of their expertise, the map of free care in this country would begin to change It also challenges those of us who are not doctors.

Every society has quiet measures of character, and one of the most revealing is how it treats its sick when they have nothing to pay with. In Pakistan, illness can undo a household’s finances faster than any storm. A lingering fever, a pain that will not settle, a laboratory test casually advised, for millions of families each of these is an economic event before it is a medical one. The question is rarely “what is wrong with me?” It is “can we afford to find out?”.  Against this backdrop, I recently took my house help to Aap Ka Clinic, the free public clinic set up by Professor Javed Akram in his ancestral house. I expected, I confess, a modest dispensary, a room, a doctor, a queue, and a prescription to be filled elsewhere. What I found rearranged my assumptions. The consultation was free. The laboratory tests were free. The medicines were free. There was no counter where a quiet humiliation waits, no moment when a patient must weigh the tablets........

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